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Silencing the Sounded Self: John Cage and the Intentionality of Nonintention
Author(s): Christopher Shultis

Source: The Musical Quarterly, Vol. 79, No. 2 (Summer, 1995), pp. 312-350
Published by: Oxford University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/742249
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Silencing the Sounded Self: John Cage
and the Intentionality of Nonintention
Christopher Shultis
"What we require is silence; but what silence requires is that I go on talking."

-John Cage, "Lecture on Nothing"
This essay will address John Cage's inclusive desire to allow room for
silence in both his musical compositions and his written texts. Cage
himself noted that "silence" had been a lifelong concern:
I've lately been thinking again about Silence, which is the title of my
first book of my own writings. When I was twelve years old I wrote that
oration that won a high school oratorical contest in Southern Califor-
nia. It was called "Other People Think," and it was about our relation
to the Latin American countries. What I proposed was silence on the
part of the United States, in order that we could hear what other peo-
ple think, and that they don't think the way we do, particularly about
us. But could you say then that, as a twelve year old, that I was pre-
pared to devote my life to silence, and to chance operations? It's hard
to say.1
Proving a lifelong devotion to chance operations, Cage's method of

achieving silence, would be difficult to accomplish. However, Cage's
entire body of work has, from the very beginning, been devoted to the
inclusion of silence in an otherwise sound-filled world.
One of the first ways in which Cage allowed silence into music
was by emphasizing duration instead of harmony. In the 1930s Cage
studied with Arnold Schoenberg, who immigrated to Los Angeles just
prior to World War II. Regarding his studies, Cage wrote: "After I
had been studying with him for two years, Schoenberg said: 'In order
to write music, you must have a feeling for harmony.' I explained to
him that I had no feeling for harmony. He then said that I would
always encounter an obstacle, that it would be as though I came to a
wall through which I could not pass. I said: 'In that case I will devote
my life to beating my head against that wall.' "2
Cage found two allies in his battle with harmony: the French
composer Erik Satie and Anton Webern, a former student of Schoen-
312
Silencing the Sounded Self 313
berg. In a lecture given at Black Mountain College in 1948, Cage

wrote:
In the field of structure, the field of the definition of parts and t

relation to a whole, there has been only one new idea since Beeth
And that new idea can be perceived in the work of Anton Weber
Erik Satie. With Beethoven, the parts of a composition were defi
means of harmony. With Satie and Webern they are defined by
of time lengths. The question of structure is so basic, and it is so
important to be in agreement about it, that one must now ask: W
Beethoven right or are Webern and Satie right? I answer immedi
and unequivocally, Beethoven was in error, and his influence, wh
has been as extensive as it is lamentable, has been deadening to th
of music.3
For Cage, duration became a means of getting around the difficulty of

"having no feeling for harmony." And by citing Webern, Cage was
able to use Schoenberg's most famous pupil as an example of how
harmony was an erroneous method of structuring music.
It was silence that pointed Cage away from a harmony and
toward duration. According to Cage, harmony as a structuring method
does not include silence:
If you consider that sound is characterized by its pitch, its loudness, its
timbre, and its duration, and that silence, which is the opposite and,
therefore, the necessary partner of sound, is characterized only by its
duration, you will be drawn to the conclusion that of the four charac-
teristics of the material of music, duration, that is, time length, is the
most fundamental. Silence cannot be heard in terms of pitch or har-
mony: It is heard in terms of time length.4
At this point, one could very well question Cage's logic. Does
it follow that since duration, by nature, includes silence, while
harmony, in and of itself, does not, duration is the only possible
approach to structuring music? Obviously not. However, it does shed
light on Cage's motivation behind believing that such was the case.
Harmony requires the imposition of unity upon musical material. It
is a humanly contrived method of writing music which cannot be
directly found in nature. C-major chords may be naturally derived, but
their structural relationships, as found in so-called tonal music, obey a
carefully and humanly constructed system of rules. Cage, on the other
hand, was looking for justification outside of any musical tradition. He
was attempting to uncover a structural connection between the mak-
ing of music and the natural world. It had little to do with how music
314 The Musical Quarterly
is conceived; it was instead an attempt to uncover how music is per-

ceived. In other words, Cage was paying more attention to how we
actually hear music than he was to how we think about music.
When we consider how music is heard, unrelated to how it is
made (if that is possible), then, indeed, duration is more fundamental
than harmony. We hear sound and silence, and we can do so directly
with neither thought nor preconception. To hear harmony, as a pre-
conceived structure of relationships between tones, requires a process
that includes a knowledge of certain musical procedures and traditions
that have as much to do with thinking as they do with hearing.
In 1948, when he wrote his "Defense of Satie," Cage still saw
composition as a unifier of experience, "an activity integrating the
opposites, the rational and the irrational."5 And, in another text,
Cage extends such abstractions into concrete musical terms: "The
material of music is sound and silence. Integrating these is compos-
ing."6 However, by looking toward natural rather than human
designs, he was already on a path away from such ordered procedures:
"there is a tendency in my composition means away from ideas of
order toward no ideas of order."'7 In 1958 Cage delivered a lecture at
Darmstadt entitled "Composition as Process," from which the previous
two citations are drawn. The first part of this lecture discusses changes
in his approach to composition. These changes describe a process
away from "ideas of order," not away from order itself. The question
continually raised in Cage's work is the question of whose order will
determine the course of the art experience. And the issue of duration
is a first step away from human derivation and human control.
From the 1930s onward, Cage used what is known as square root
form, one of his first attempts at structuring music by duration rather
than by pitch. Macrostructure and microstructure coincide, so that if
there are four measures per unit there will be four units; and if the
internal phrasing of the bars is 1-2-1, the external division of parts
(within the large structure of four units) will also be 1-2-1. For
example, in his First Construction in Metal, there are sixteen measures
in each structural unit. To make the square root, there are, conse-
quently, sixteen units. The large structure is divided symmetrically as
follows: four, three, two, three, four, thus totaling sixteen, and each
individual unit is similarly divided. This method, used in most of
Cage's music during the 1930s and 1940s, eventually produces a for-
mal structure independent of its content. Content, in this period, was
still primarily a matter of taste, as can be seen, for example, in Cage's
selection of piano preparations for his Sonatas and Interludes: "The
materials, the piano preparations, were chosen as one chooses shells
while walking along a beach. The form was as natural as my taste

permitted." On the other hand, regarding the form of the sonatas,
Cage wrote: "[N]othing about the structure was determined by the
materials which were to occur in it; it was conceived, in fact, so that
it could be as well expressed by the absence of these materials as by
their presence."8
Interchangeability of content in a fixed structure is equally appar-
ent in his "Lecture on Nothing" (1950), written soon after he wrote
Sonatas and Interludes (1946-48). This lecture is the first published
instance in which Cage took structural ideas from music and used
them in the creation of texts. And it is this approach that character-
izes a continuing relationship between Cage's music and his texts
through the mid-1970s (at which point this study ends): "In writing
my 'literary' texts, I essentially make use of the same composing means
as in my music."9
The "Lecture on Nothing" uses square root form and is described
as such by Cage, in a way characteristic of many of his later texts,
through an introduction to the published lecture: "There are four
measures in each line and twelve lines in each unit of the rhythmic
structure. There are forty-eight such units, each having forty-eight
measures. The whole is divided into five large parts, in the proportion
7, 6, 14, 14, 7. The forty-eight measures of each unit are likewise so
divided."10 We are thus informed of exactly how Cage made the
structure. In this case, an integrating of rational and irrational would
see structure (form) as rational and content as irrational, or what
Cage at that time regarded as the integration of mind and heart. "11
As a formal invention, Cage's use of square root form does sug-
gest the direction of music first, text second. However, in keeping
with my thesis that music and text interact one with another, Cage's
"Lecture on Nothing" contains certain important ideas not previously
discernible in his musical work. First and foremost is the distinction
between "having nothing to say and saying it"12 and the "integration
of opposites." What still applies as a formal idea no longer holds as
content. Cage's writing is nonintentional, whereas integration, still
present in the relation between form and content, demands a very
specific intention. Thus, while Cage's innovations regarding composi-
tional form move from music to text, certain innovative ideas move
from text to music.
The most important of those ideas is the coexistent nature of
sound and silence, of something and nothing: "I have nothing to say
and I am saying it and that is poetry as I need it."'3 This remark, also
cited above, is from the beginning of Cage's "Lecture on Nothing." Its
origin in Cage's aesthetic is twofold. First, Cage's attempts at art as

communication were, according to him, miserable failures. A prepared
piano piece entitled The Perilous Night (1943-44) is a famous exam-
ple. Based on "an Irish folktale he remembered from a volume of
myths collected by Joseph Campbell," The Perilous Night concerns "a
perilous bed which rested on a floor of polished jasper. The music tells
the story of the dangers of the erotic life."14 After a critic wrote that
the last movement sounded like "a woodpecker in a church belfry,"
Cage responded: "I had poured a great deal of emotion into the piece,
and obviously I wasn't communicating this at all. Or else, I thought,
if I were communicating, then all artists must be speaking a different
language, and thus speaking only for themselves."15 Cage decided,
from that point on, that he would no longer compose music until he
found a reason other than communication for writing it.
Second, "having nothing to say" was the reason that allowed
Cage to continue composing. It was through Gita Sarabhai, an Indian
musician who was studying Western music with Cage, that he learned
"the traditional reason for making a piece of music in India: 'to quiet
the mind thus making it susceptible to divine influences.' " According
to Cage, this led music away from self-expression and toward self-
alteration through the influence of our natural environment: "We
learned from Oriental thought that those divine influences are, in
fact, the environment in which we are. A sober and quiet mind is one
in which the ego does not obstruct the fluency of the things which
come in through our senses and up through our dreams."16
"Having nothing to say" allows that environment the opportu-
nity to speak. In Cage's work, partially as a result of his studies of
Eastern religion and philosophy beginning in the 1940s, it is a process
of diminishing the role of the self in the creative act. He was espe-
cially influenced in this regard by reading Aldous Huxley's anthology
The Perennial Philosophy. 17 This book describes a shared religious
mysticism found in both East and West:
The divine Ground of all existence is a spiritual Absolute, ineffable in

terms of discursive thought, but (in certain circumstances) susceptible
of being directly experienced and realized by the human being. This
Absolute is the God-without-form of Hindu and Christian mystical
phraseology. The last end of man, the ultimate reason for human exist-
ence, is unitive knowledge of the divine Ground-the knowledge that
can come only to those who are prepared to "die to self" and so make
room as it were, for God.'8
Cage, more often than not, tried to emphasize the removal of

separations between West and East. Consequently, it was of great
significance when, after learning the Indian reason for making music,
Lou Harrison discovered while "reading in an old English text, I think
as old as the sixteenth century . . . he found this reason given for
writing a piece of music: 'to quiet the mind thus making it susceptible
to divine influences.' "19 This approach to composition was no longer
cultural; it was universal in the original sense of the word.20 Found in
all cultures, such quietude was a reaching out into the world around
us, a removal of the separation between self and world-a nondual
view of reality.
Thus, although Cage's "Lecture on Nothing" is compositionally
dual, in that form and content still combine rational and irrational,
the written content is nondual in nature: "I have nothing to say and I
am saying it. " "What silence requires is that I go on talking. " Such
statements are obviously paradoxical and thus obviously influenced by
Cage's study of Zen. In his introduction to The Zen Teaching of Huang
Po, the translator, John Blofeld, writes: "At first sight Zen works must
seem so paradoxical as to bewilder the reader. On one page we are
told that everything is indivisibly one Mind, on another that the
moon is very much a moon and a tree indubitably a tree."21 And
while silence as a phenomenon outside the self had entered into sev-
eral of Cage's musical compositions, both in the 1930s and 1940s, his
"Lecture on Nothing" is the first instance in which silence is produced
through such paradox: within the self via what Cage considered his
most important legacy, "having shown the practicality of making
works of art nonintentionally.'"22
Nonintention had become, for Cage, a new, nondualistic realiza-
tion of what silence really was. He used the example of his visit to an
anechoic chamber which was supposed to produce a silent environ-
ment: "I entered one at Harvard University several years ago and
heard two sounds, one high and one low. When I described them to
the engineer in charge, he informed me that the high one was my
nervous system in operation, the low one my blood in circulation.
Until I die there will be sounds. And they will continue following my
death. One need not fear about the future of music."23 His visit had
proved to him that, in the dualistic sense of sound versus silence,
there "was no silence." There were only intended and unintended
sounds.
Cage's first recorded instance of unintended sound was textual:
"I have nothing to say and am saying it." Having nothing to say and
saying it goes an important step further than just having nothing to
say. It implies what Cage makes specific in his "Lecture on Some-
thing" (1950): "This is a talk about something and naturally also a
talk about nothing. About how something and nothing are not
opposed to each other but need each other to keep on going."24 And
while formally Cage does not make nonintentional texts until long
after having accomplished this in musical compositions, he does man-
age to address the idea of nonintentional content in a text before he
is able to do so in music.
It is through chance operations that Cage begins making unin-
tentional music. For Cage, it was an extremely unorthodox way of
Zen practice:
[R]ather than taking the path that is prescribed in the formal practice
of Zen Buddhism itself, namely, sitting cross-legged and breathing and
such things, I decided that my proper discipline was the one to which I
was already committed, namely, the making of music. And that I
would do it with a means that was as strict as sitting cross-legged,
namely, the use of chance operations, and the shifting of my responsi-
bility from the making of choices to that of asking questions.25
While those conversant with Zen might not view Cage's practice as
Buddhism, it did serve as a very effective method of composing.
Beginning around 1950, Cage used the I Ching (Book of Changes)
as a source of response to his compositional questions.26 In his fore-
word to the Richard Wilhelm translation, C. G. Jung writes:
The axioms of causality are being shaken to their foundations: we know

now that what we term natural laws are merely statistical truths and
thus must necessarily allow for exceptions. We have not sufficiently
taken into account as yet that we need the laboratory with its incisive
restrictions in order to demonstrate the invariable validity of natural
law. If we leave things to nature, we see a very different picture: every
process is partially or totally interfered with by chance, so much so that
under natural circumstances a course of events absolutely conforming to
specific laws is almost an exception. The Chinese mind, as I see it at
work in the I Ching, seems to be exclusively preoccupied with the
chance aspect of things.27
And while Jung used the I Ching as a means of discovering the uncon-
scious mind within, Cage saw it as a way of getting outside the mind
altogether, a way of allowing nature, the environment, or what Zen
would call Mind with a capital M, to respond to his compositional
questions.
As Cage frequently mentioned, the idea of a "silent piece" was
conceived earlier than 1952, when 4'33" received its premiere. It
was first publicly mentioned in an address entitled "A Composer's
Confessions," given on 28 February 1948 before the National Inter-

Collegiate Arts Conference at Vassar College:
I have, for instance, several new desires (two may seem absurd but I am
serious about them): first, to compose a piece of uninterrupted silence
and sell it to the Muzak Co. It will be 3 or 31 minutes long; these
being the standard lengths of "canned" music and its title will be Silent
Prayer. It will open with a single idea which I will attempt to make as
seductive as the color and shape and fragrance of a flower. The ending
will approach imperceptibility.28
This "single idea" became a process of making music that Cage

learned from Ananda Coomeraswamy: "I have for many years
accepted, and I still do, the doctrine about Art, occidental and orien-
tal, set forth by Ananda K. Coomeraswamy in his book The Transfor-
nmation of Nature in Art, that the function of art is to imitate Nature in
her manner of operation.""29 Cage used the I Ching as a way of "imi-
tating nature in her manner of operation," and by constructing his
4'33" through chance operations, he did indeed find a method of
making a process parallel to the seductiveness of "the color and shape
and fragrance of a flower." It was Cage's use of chance operations that
made possible a formal design to place the silence in. And when one
listens to the silence of 4'33", one hears nature.
However, following nature in her manner of operation proved to
be problematic for Cage. He realized that even though 4'33" was
made solely of nonintended sounds, he was still providing the frame.
Even if, as in the case of 4'33", the length of that frame was chosen
nonintentionally through chance operations, Cage was still making a
fixed object.
This eventually ran counter to Cage's notion that things
"become" in processes rather than as fixed objects: "You say: the real,
the world as it is. But it is not, it becomes! It moves, it changes! It
doesn't wait for us to change. . . . It is more mobile than you can
imagine. You are getting closer to this reality when you say as it 'pre-
sents itself'; that means that it is not there, existing as an object. The
world, the real is not an object. It is a process."30
4'33" also insufficiently addresses Cage's professed nondualism,
where "something and nothing" are unopposed. 4'33" allows the unin-
tentional into music. The performer simply sits and listens as the
audience listens. As such, this piece exemplifies a movement toward
the silence of "nothing" and the acceptance of nonintentional sounds.
But what about intentional sounds? Are these accepted? At what
point in 4'33" does Cage allow the performer, or the composer, for
that matter, to produce the "something" of intentional sounds? How

can something and nothing be unopposed if only "nothing" is
allowed? These are, of course, rhetorical questions, and as such their
answers are obvious. Something and nothing can be only unopposed if
both intention and nonintention equally coexist.
This sent Cage in the direction of indeterminacy, and in 1958
he began his famous series of Variations:
The first one was involved with the parameters of sound, the transpar-
encies overlaid, and each performer making measurements that would
locate sounds in space. Then, while I was at Wesleyan University, in
this first piece I had had five lines on a single transparent sheet, though
I had had no intention of putting them the way I did, I just drew them
quickly. At Wesleyan while talking to some students it suddenly
occurred to me that there would be much more freedom if I put only a
single line or a single notation on a single sheet. So I did that with
Variations II but it still involved measurement.31
Next followed a piece without measurement entitled Variations III,

written in the short period of two months, from December 1962 to
January 1963. Richard Kostelanetz implies that Variations III solves
some inherent problems with the published version of 4'33", one of
which, of course, is the measurement of time:
Since Cage invariably takes the intellectual leaps his radical ideas
imply, he subsequently concluded that not only were any and all sounds
"music," but the time-space frame of 4'33" was needlessly arbitrary, for
unintentional music is indeed with us-available to the ear that wishes
to perceive it--in all spaces and at all times. (Variations III [1964], he
once told me over dinner, is so open, "We could be performing it right
now, if we decided to do so" . . .).32
The published score includes a title page with the statement,

"Variations III for one or any number of people performing any
actions." There are no prescribed genres, either in music or any other
medium, except for the fact that it is to be "performed." The actions
themselves are also undetermined except for the possibility that there
will be actions. The instruction page then reads:
Two transparent sheets of plastic, one having forty-two undifferentiated

circles, the other blank. Cut the sheet having circles in such a way that
there are forty-two sheets, each having a complete circle. Let these fall
on a sheet of paper 8 x 11. If a circle does not overlap at least one
other circle, remove it. Remove also any smaller groups of circles that
are separated from the largest group, so that a single maze of circles
remains, no one of them isolated from at least one other. Place the
blank transparent sheet over this complex.
Starting with any circle, observe the number of circles which overlap
it. Make an action or actions having the corresponding number of
interpenetrating variables (1 + n). This done, move on to any one of
the overlapping circles again observing the number of interpenetrations,
performing a suitable action or actions, and so on.
Some or all of one's obligation may be performed through ambient

circumstances (environmental changes) by simply noticing or
responding to them.
Though no means are given for the measurement of time or space

(beginning, ending, or questions of continuity) or the specific interpen-
etration of circles, such measurement and determination means are not
necessarily excluded from the "interpenetrating variables."
Some factors though not all of a given interpenetration or succession of

several may be planned in advance. But leave room for the use of
unforeseen eventualities.
Any other activities are going on at the same time.33
The following brief analysis Will show that in this piece Cage pro-
duced a truly nondual composition that allows both something and
nothing to equally coexist.
Cage's use of transparencies is one of the best methods he ever
devised to insure an indeterminate composition. The usual score, even
one where chance procedures determine it, is fixed. Once printed, the
notation by nature is unchanged. This produces an object, and Cage
fully realized that. Even in his Music for Piano series for example,
where the notations are merely his observations of imperfections in
the score paper, or in the elaborately constructed series of chance
operations used to make Williams Mix, "[A]II the cutting, all the splic-
ing of the Williams Mix is carefully controlled by chance operations.
This was characteristic of an old period, before indeterminacy in per-
formance, you see; for all I was doing then by chance operations was
renouncing my intention. Although my choices were controlled by
chance operations, I was still making an object."34
Through transparencies, however, the score need not be initially
fixed. For example, in Variations III one drops circles on a page, which
results in a collection of interpenetrating circles. However, there are
multiple possibilities regarding how many circles remain, if they inter-

sect, and how many must be removed if they do not. The composer
certainly does not determine that; nor does the performer. Even
though the score is eventually fixed, it can be fixed differently for
each performance. Furthermore, if there is more than one performer,
there can also be more than one determined score. While fixity still
exists in Cage's transparency scores, the variables are so multiple
(hence the title "variations") it would be next to impossible to
determine what exactly will be fixed and what will remain open.
If the score itself seems variably determined, the performer's
interaction with the score is even more variable. By looking at one
circle, one simply observes how many interpenetrations there are
between it and any other connecting circle and then performs an
action for each observed interpenetration. Such actions can be either
planned or unplanned, although Cage does insist that room be left to
do both. Observation of "ambient circumstances" can either produce
an action or can actually be the action. Because there is no indicated
time measurement and because "other activities are going on at the
same time," a performance of Variations III, once begun, need never
end. One could follow the score for a time, enter into the experience
of an ambient circumstance, and continue reacting to those circum-
stances indefinitely. Or as Cage noted:
Just as I came to see that there was no such thing as silence, and so
wrote the silent piece, I was now coming to the realization that there
was no such thing as nonactivity. In other words the sand in which the
stones in a Japanese garden lie is also something ... And so I made
Variations III which leaves no space between one thing and the next
and posits that we are constantly active, that these actions can be of
any kind and all I ask the performer to do is to be aware as much as he
can of how many actions he is performing. I ask him, in other words,
to count. That's all I ask him to do. I ask him even to count passive
actions, such as noticing that there is a noise in the environment. We
move through our activity without any space between one action and
the next, and with many overlapping actions. The thing I don't like
about Variations III is that it requires counting and I'm now trying to
get rid of that. But I thought that performance was simply getting up
and then doing it.35
On the other hand, one need not count past an environmental

experience, if one chooses to remain in it. And Cage himself under-
stood the difficulties: "But what, how and why are we counting? Since
there are no gaps between one action and another (and many of them
overlap) do we know when something is finished and the next begins?

The situation is irrational."36 It is, in fact, the openness of Variations
III, where rational and irrational coexist without reconciliation, that
allows the performer to enter into or go out of the piece at will, while
paradoxically staying within its notated structure. Thus intention and
nonintention equally coexist, while, due to the several layers of expe-
riences going on at the same time, a multiplicity of intentions collec-
tively produce an unintentional and indeterminate piece. In Variations
III something and nothing really do need each other; they coexist in a
fabric of art and life completely interwoven one with another. Cage
once spoke of a conversation with the visual artist Willem de Koon-
ing: "I was with de Kooning once in a restaurant and he said, 'if I put
a frame around these bread crumbs, that isn't art.' And what I'm say-
ing is that it is. He was saying it wasn't because he connects art with
his activity-he connects with himself as an artist whereas I would
want art to slip out of us into the world in which we live."37 In 4'33"
Cage placed a frame around the "bread crumbs," thus beginning the
process of dismantling dualistic separations such as the one mentioned
between art and life. In Variations III, nondual experience is complete:
the final impediment, the frame, is removed.
If, as has been suggested here, the lectures on both "nothing"
and "something" inform the musical directions Cage pursues in 4'33"
and Variations III, it is equally true that those two compositions point
toward Cage's future developments in literature. The gestation period
was long. Richard Kostelanetz wrote in 1968: "What is conspicuously
lacking in A Year from Monday [Cage's second book] is an analogous
path-breaking gesture that could command as much suggestive influ-
ence for literature as his earlier 'musical' demonstrations.'"38 This, in
and of itself, need not matter. Many composers have also been writ-
ers, and there is usually no consequent claim asserted that somehow
the writing must be up to the same level as the music. Frequently-
and this is as true of Cage as of many others--the writings are an
explanation of what is happening in the music. Thus it is not a com-
mon expectation that a composer's writings must somehow qualify as
literature.
However, Cage implies from the very first that, in some cases at
least, his writings go beyond musical explanation. As Cage wrote in
his introduction to Silence, "When M. C. Richards asked me why I
didn't one day give a conventional informative lecture, adding that
that would be the most shocking thing I could do, I said, 'I don't give
these lectures to surprise people, but out of a need for poetry.' " He
went on to write: "As I see it, poetry is not prose simply because
poetry is in one way or another formalized. It is not poetry by reason

of its content or ambiguity but by reason of its allowing musical ele-
ments (time, sound) to be introduced into the world of words.""39 It is
in this context, then, that one might expect a literary critic (which is
the hat Kostelanetz most frequently wears) familiar with Cage's musi-
cal inventions to express disappointment in the less revolutionary
nature of Cage's texts.
Cage's textual work in the 1960s had more to do with his devel-
oping sensibilities as a poet than it did with trying to equal his
achievements in music. On the other hand, two textual inventions
are worthy of note: his mesostics and his diaries, only one of which
(the diaries) concerns this analysis.40
The diary form was used by Cage for many years, beginning in
1965 and ending with his eighth diary in 1982. His Diary: Audience
1966, while not a part of this series, is short and uses the same formal
structure as his other diaries. I also received permission from Cage to
use photocopies of pages from the stenographic notepad Cage used to
compose this piece. These were obtained from the John Cage Literary
Archive, Wesleyan University Library, and serve as the raw material
for this analysis. While Cage did not leave detailed information about
how those materials were used, he did leave a trail, in various sources,
through which I will try to reconstruct the compositional process.
The first place to check for clues is the introduction to the text,
where Cage frequently provided information about how his pieces
were written:
This text was written on the highways while driving from an audience
in Rochester, New York, to one in Philadelphia. Following the writing
plan I had used for Diary: Emma Lake, I formulated in my mind while
driving a statement having a given number of words. When it had
jelled and I could repeat it, I drew up somewhere along the road, wrote
it down, and then drove on. When I arrived in Philadelphia, the text
was finished.41
The full title of the source Cage mentions is Diary: Emma Lake
Music Workshop 1965. This introduction reads:
Just before setting out for Saskatchewan to conduct a music workshop

at Emma Lake in July 1965, I received a request from the editor of
Canadian Art for an article having fifteen hundred words. Since I was
busy with a number of projects, I was on the point of replying that I
had no time, when I noticed that I would be at the workshop for fif-
teen days and that if I wrote one hundred words a day it wouldn't be
too much for me and the magazine would get what it wanted. Instead
of different type faces, I used parentheses and italics to distinguish one
statement from another. I set the text in a single block like a paragraph
of prose. Otherwise I used the mosaic-discipline of writing described in
the note preceding Diary: How to Improve etc. 1965.42
The above-mentioned Diary introduction reads: "It is a mosaic of

ideas, statements, words and stories. It is also a diary. For each day, I
determined by chance operations how many parts of the mosaic I
would write and how many words there would be in each. The num-
ber of words per day was to equal, or, by the last statement written, to
exceed one hundred words."43
With the information provided by these introductions, analysis
can begin. The first page of Cage's notebook (Figure 1) includes the
working title "On Audience" and shows a series of numbers to the left
of the roman numerals I-VI. These roman numerals correspond to the
six large sections of the text. As will be seen, everything but the six is
explainable according to the procedures previously described. How-
ever, one thing that characterizes all of Cage's work is that every
compositional decision had a reason behind it, even if the decision
was not to decide. Why six? Two clues offer a plausible answer. First,
Cage claims to have followed the same procedure in writing "Audi-
ence" that he used for Emma Lake. That diary had fifteen parts, one
for each day of the workshop. Second, in Cage's introduction to
"Audience" he writes that it was composed while driving from Roch-
ester to Philadelphia. And (not coincidentally, I believe) in 1965 the
approximate driving time from Rochester to Philadelphia was six
hours.44 Thus, the large structure may have been conceived by writing
a hundred words per hour!
The first page also has thirteen I Ching derived hexagrams, with
some (but not all) of the corresponding numbers written out below.
Cage described how he used the I Ching in "To Describe the Process
of Composition Used in Music of Changes and Imaginary Landscape
No. 4":
What brings about this unpredictability is the use of the method estab-
lished in the I Ching (Book of Changes) for the obtaining of oracles,
that of tossing three coins six times. Three coins tossed once yields four
lines: three heads, broken with a circle; two tails and a head, straight;
two heads and a tail, broken; three tails, straight with a circle. Three
coins tossed thrice yields eight trigrams (written from the base up):
chien, three straight; chen, straight, broken, broken; kan, broken,
straight, broken; ken, broken, broken, straight; kun, three broken; sun,
V3 V 'S~i~
\/ \( ~y I
2.3
to ;L " y6 2m
_..- ,(., -_
92-)
,T"h^,v ..n
, v - (I
; f,
@,,@,....
-"o?.
!k~?s (; .t.,"
;j,, rs
'.L .LC
..,==. ""?
Figure 1.
broken, straight, straight; li, straight, broken, straight; tui, straight,

straight, broken. Three coins tossed six times yield sixty-four hexagrams
(two trigrams, the second written above the first) read in reference to a
chart of the numbers 1 to 64 in a traditional arrangement having eight
divisions horizontally corresponding to the eight lower trigrams and
eight divisions vertically corresponding to the eight upper trigrams. A

hexagram having lines with circles is read twice, first as written, then
as changed. Thus, chien-chien, straight lines with circles, is read first
as 1, then as kun-kun, 2; whereas chien-chien, straight lines without
circles is read only as 1.45
In Diary: Audience 1966, the first hexagram (see Figure 1) corre-

sponds to number sixty-three on the chart and is then placed first next
to the roman numeral I. The next hexagram is thirty.46 However,
since the first hexagram has a changing line in the li trigram (straight,
broken, straight) it changes that trigram to chien (straight, straight,
straight) to form the chien-kan hexagram of five. In like fashion,
thirty becomes twenty-one to form the first large part of the Diary.47
Consequently, it is a reading of the changing lines that enables thir-
teen hexagrams to produce twenty-one numbers. Symmetrical alter-
ation (four texts, part I; three texts, part II; four texts, part III; three
texts, part IV; four texts, part V; three texts, part VI) seems likely to
have been planned. However, following Cage's previous use of at least
one hundred words per structural unit, one discovers that such a
relationship is literally produced "by chance."48
While such symmetry as well as the number of words in each
written statement is chance derived, little else is. The method of
distinguishing between statements (see Figure 2) is the same as with
the Diary: Emma Lake. Each of the six groups has either three or four
statements. If there are three statements, they are distinguished by
putting the second statement in parentheses. If there are four, the
statements are distinguished in two possible ways. First, the initial
statement is printed normally, the second is underlined (italicized in
the published text), the third is printed normally, and the fourth is in
parentheses. Second, the initial statement is printed normally, the
second statement is in parentheses, the third statement is printed
normally, and the fourth is underlined (italicized in the published
text). This procedure obviously demonstrates both consistency and
fairness (in the four statements, he reverses the pattern of underlining
and parentheses); however, these are not necessarily traits of chance-
operated results.
The method described above was probably chosen arbitrarily
within what has been shown to be a chance-derived formal structure.
However, granting that, an analysis of the content placed within this
structure shows the composer to be even more actively involved in
making choices. Choosing the texts themselves is obvious enough.
Cage constructed them in his mind while driving, according to the
,odiY3r AUDIENCE 1966

I. Are we an audience for computer art? The answer's not No; it's Yes.
What we need is a computer that isn't labor-saving but, which increases the
work for us to do, that puns (this is McLuhan's idea) as well as Joyce
revealing bridges (this is Brown's idea) where we thought there weren't any,
turns us (my idea) not "on" but into artists. Orthodox seating arrangement
in synagogues. Indians have known it for agess life's a dance, a play,
illusion. Lila, Maya. Twentieth-century art's opened our eyes. Now music's
opened our ears. Theatre? Just notice what's around. (If what you want
in India is an audience, Gita Sarabhai told me, all you nee , is one or two
people.) II. He saids Listening to your music I find it prorokes me. What
should I do to enjoy it? Answer: There're many ways to help you. I'd give
you a lift, for instance, if you were going in my direction, but the last
thing I'd do would be to tell you how to use your own aesthetic faculties.
(You see? We're unemployed. If not yet, "soon again 'twill be." We have
nothing to do. So what shall we do? Sit in an audience? Write criticism?
Be creative?) We used to have the artist up on a pedestal. Now he's no more
extraordinary than we are. III. Notice audiences at high altitudes and
audiences in northern countries tend to be attentive during performances
while audiences at sea-level or in warm countries voice their feelings
whenever they have them. Are we, so to speak, going south in the way we
experience art? Audience participation? (Having nothing to do, we do it
nonetheless; our biggest problem is finding scraps of time in which to get
it done. Discovery. Awareness.) "Leave the beaten traik. You'll see
something never seen before." After the first performance of my piece for
twelve radios,t Virgil Thomson said, "You can't do that sort of thing and
expect people to pay for it." Separation. IV. When our time was &iven to
physical labor, we needed a stiff upper lip and backbone. Now that we're
changing our minds, intent on things invisible, inaudible, we have other
spineless virtues: flexibility, fluency. Dreams, daily events, everything
gets to and through us. (Art, if you want a definition of it, is criminal
action. It conforms to no rules. Not even its own. Anyont who experiences
a work of art is as guilty as the artist. It is not a question of sharing
the guilt. Each one of us gets all of it.) They asked me about theatres
in New York. I said we could use them. They should be small for the
audiences, the performing areas large and spacious, equipped for television
broadcast for those who prefer staying atrtom?. TLzr -hol._d-be-a

Figure 2.
number of words required. After he had worked them into a form he

could remember, he pulled over and wrote them down. According to
his written introduction, the text was finished by the time he arrived
in Philadelphia. This story seemed so remarkable that David Revill
actually comments specifically about it in his biography of Cage:
"With characteristic self-discipline, he ascertained at the start of each
leg of the journey how many words were needed for the next state-
ment of the text, formulated it and revised it in his head as he drove,
pulled over and wrote it down, checked the length of the next state-
ment and drove on. By the time he reached Philadelphia, the piece
was finished."49 This may seem somewhat redundant, since when one
looks up the author's reference it is, in fact, the text itself as pub-
lished in A Year from Monday. However, when one compares the
stenographic notebook to both Cage's introduction and Revill's bio-
graphical elaboration of it, certain things do not add up. If Cage were
writing according to the number of words required in each statement,
one would assume that the first text in the notebook would correspond
to the first I Ching-derived hexagram number sixty-three. Instead we
find that the first written text in the notebook is fifty-one. There is,
in fact, no correlation between the order of hexagrams drawn on the
first notebook page and the order of texts found in the notebook.50
It is unlikely that Cage really finished the Diary by the time he
reached Philadelphia and even less likely that he wrote it in the way
Revill describes. The following is a more likely scenario. Cage formu-
lated certain statements, some of which were directly related to the
topic of the conference where the speech was to be delivered ("The
Changing Audience for the Changing Arts"). When looking at the
initial numbers most of them are large-51, 50, 43, 33, 46, and so
on-and at the very end there are four numbers left--24, 17, 10, and
5 (see Figure 3). And Cage does indeed do these last four in order
from large to small (see n. 50). Thus, Cage probably began thinking
of things either that he wanted to say or that independently came into
his head, paying attention to whether these statements were long or
short approximately according to the I Ching numbers he, in all
likelihood, generated prior to the trip.
How do we know that they were approximations and that Cage
did not have an exact number of words in his mind? First, there is a
disparity between generated numbers and written texts. The only
other possibility is that Cage worked out of another notebook first and
then rewrote everything into the notebook found in his archive. This
is extremely doubtful. Anyone who visits either of Cage's archives is
immediately impressed by the fact that he appears to have saved
t7
VI I((
cl , Niv. "1
p,?lne* ~W
ifI
Figure 3.
everything, and saved it in an orderly fashion. This is particularly true

with the materials found in the literary archive at Wesleyan, most of
which were eventually published. In all probability, this notebook is
what Cage used to initially write down these texts. Looking again at
Figure 1, one notices as further confirmation that the numbers listed
to the left of the roman numerals are circled. I would suggest that
these were circled as Cage completed that particular text. If accepted,
this reasoning also helps explain both the four numbers (24, 17, 10,
and 5) on the last four pages of the notebook and the fact that nei-
ther 10 nor 5 is circled: since these were probably the last-completed
texts, circling was therefore unnecessary.
Second, the notebooks show that Cage very carefully edited each
of the statements until they did match exactly. And although it is
questionable whether or not Cage could both write and edit each of
these texts while at the same time driving to Philadelphia, such issues,
unlike the previous speculations, do not directly affect this analysis.
What matters is the editing itself. Figure 4 shows what reads as num-
ber sixty-one but is actually sixty-three and is thus the very first state-
ment in the published text. For comparison (and for reasons of
legibility) it is reproduced below (parentheses correspond to text Cage
crossed out):
(Stet) 61
(Could we do it with a computer?
(Not art, but)
I don't mean make computer art
Are we an audience for computer art?
but Can (cd.)5' we sit in an audience
computer art
and enjoy (it) once it (was)/is made?)
not
(Don't think) (T)the answer's No;

it's (inevitably) Yes. (What) W(w)e
need (is) a computer that
isn't labor saving but which
increases the work for us
to do, that (as McLuhan says)
this is McLuhan's idea
(can) puns as well as Joyce
(this is) this is Brown's idea
revealing bridges where we thought
there weren't (none). any, turns us
my idea not "on" but into
artists.
?of . .. ,A.
4, 4
IA1L
. . . .
-Il
Figure 4.
Compare this to the published text:
I. Are we an audience for computer art? The answer's not No; it's Yes.
What we need is a computer that isn't labor-saving but which
increases the work for us to do, that puns (this is McLuhan's idea) as
well as Joyce revealing bridges (this is Brown's idea) where we
thought there weren't any, turns us (my idea) not "on" but into
artists.52
The difference is remarkable, and the final result (even if the original
somehow seems more poetic) does closely resemble Cage's view of
poetry as "formalized" prose.53 This leads to the following question:
Did Cage edit the text simply to meet the prescribed sixty-three
words, or did he also edit for reasons of personal taste ? By comparing
script and differing ways of crossing out words we can reproduce what
Cage originally wrote:
Could we do it with a computer?

but cd. we sit in an audience
and enjoy it once it was made?
Don't think the answer's No;
it's inevitably Yes. What we
need is a computer that
isn't labor saving but which
increases the work for us
to do, that as McLuhan says
can puns as well as Joyce
revealing bridges where we thought
there weren't none.
This excerpt, as is, totals seventy-two words. If one looks at the top of
the page (Figure 4) one can distinguish two crossed-out numbers fol-
lowed by "-1." These numbers are first 9, then 4. The text repro-
duced above minus nine words would have equaled the required sixty-
three. Consequently, Cage needed to remove nine words. It would be
very difficult to determine the order in which Cage made these
changes, so instead we will follow them as they occur in the text.
Cage crosses out all of "Could we do it with a computer? I don't mean
make computer art but cd. we sit iri an audience and enjoy it once it
was made?" and changes it to "Are we an audience for computer art?"
The original has twenty-seven words while the change has seven,
leaving a difference of twenty words. This is not exactly a time-saving
method of removing nine words. It means that Cage would have had
to come up with eleven more words if he accepted the change, which

seems unlikely.
What if Cage instead began by crossing out unnecessary words as
follows, without an alteration of the text: "inevitably," "what," "is,"
"as McLuhan says," "can," "none." This shows a remarkable similarity
to the crossed-out numbers. Removing "inevitably," "what," "is,"
"can," and "none" leaves four; removing "as McLuhan says" leaves
one. And, although I am by no means a handwriting expert, it also
appears to be consistent with Cage's various noticeable styles of cross-
ing out words. If such were the case, by crossing out "Don't think"
and adding "not" to make "The answer's not No; it's Yes," Cage
would have made a statement with sixty-three words:
Could we do it with a computer?

but cd. we sit in an audience
and enjoy it once it was made?
The answer's not No; it's Yes.
We need a computer that isn't
labor saving but which increases
the work for us to do, that puns
as well as Joyce revealing bridges
where we thought there weren't.
I believe the evidence indicates that Cage initially made this text
and then changed it. It was purposely altered at great additional
expense of time, especially considering the fact that he reportedly was
in a hurry. The reasons could be several, but two are probable and
important to this analysis. One, he may have wished to alter the orig-
inal meaning: "any, turns us (my idea) not 'on' but into artists" is
clearly a text added to suit the addition of "this is McLuhan's idea"
and "this is Brown's idea." Two, he may simply have not liked the
results of his initial editing and one could say that the final product
does read "better."
Looking at the manuscript as a whole, one sees that there are
alterations made on every page. The five-word page "Orthodox seating
arrangement" (see Figure 5) was originally "Ordinary 20th Century
human beings." In addition, there are two versions, of which only one
is selected, for both numbers forty-three and forty-six. The texts
respectively have to do with Cage's mother and with television and
were, in all likelihood, omitted for the same reason "Ordinary 20th
century human beings" was changed: because they are not directly
related to "audience," the subject of the speech.
I. Are we an audience for c mputer art? The answer's not
No; it's Yes. What we need us a computer that isn't
labor saving but which incre ses the work for us to do,
that puns (this is McLuhan's idea) as well as Joyce
revealing bridges (this is Brown's idea) where we thought
there weren't any, turns us my idea) not "on" but into
artists,. - ....1 Indians have

known it for ages: life's a Lance, a play, illusion. Lila.
Maya. Twentieth century art' opened our eyes. Now music's
opened our ears. Theater? JLst notice what's around. (If
what you want in India is aniaudience, Gita Sarabh

me, all you need is one or two people.) II. He said:
Listening to your music I find it provokes me. What should
I do to enjoy it? Answer: There're many ways to help you.
I'd give you a lift,for instance,if you were going in my

direction, but the last thing I'd do would be to tell you
how to use your own aesthetic faculties. (You see? W

unemployed. If not yet, "soon again 'twill be." We have
nothing to do. So what shall we do? Sit in an audience?
Write criticism? Be creative?) We used to have the
artist up on a pedestal. Now he's no more extraordinary
than we are. III. Notice audiences at high altitudes
and audiences in northern countries tend to be attentive
Figure 5.
Thus what initially appears to be an improvised and haphazard

text is actually extremely well-organized. Some aspects of form are the
result of chance operations and some aren't. The contents, on the
other hand, are clearly the result of trying to meet the extraordinary
demands of numerical form, subject matter and personal taste. Even
though the juxtapositions, as Cage points out, are chance-derived, the
composer's role is so pervasive that the resultant collage of text is, if
not completely determined, at least predictable. It is, I would suggest,
an immensely taxing exercise of the composer's will that does not
compare favorably if one is trying to produce the kind of nonintention
in text that he had already produced in music.
Was Cage trying to produce nonintention in text? His statements
lean in that direction. In 1965 he said, "It has been my habit for
some years to write texts in a way analogous to the way I write
music."54 Yet, as the previous analysis has shown, analogous means,
in this case chance operations, do not necessarily produce similar
results. Something more was necessary, something more than simply
formalized prose. Cage was looking for a way to "musicate language,"
as can be seen in the following exchange between Cage and the
French philosopher and musicologist Daniel Charles sometime
between 1968 and 1970:
CHARLES: You propose to musicate language; you want language to be

heard as music.
CAGE: I hope to let words exist, as I have tried to let sounds exist.55
An essential aspect of Cage's approach to sound is away from memory:
There is a beautiful statement, in my opinion, by Marcel Duchamp:

"To reach the impossibility of transferring from one like object to
another the memory imprint." And he expressed that as a goal. That
means, from his visual point of view, to look at a Coca-Cola bottle
without the feeling that you've ever seen one before, as though you
were looking at it for the very first time. That's what I'd like to find
with sounds-to play them and hear them as if you've never heard
them before.56
The failure of Cage's earlier text pieces was their acceptance of the
symbolism that relies upon memory through the syntactical connec-
tions and relationships inherent in language. To move away from
memory, one must move away from language.
In the mid-1960s he found a connection between Duchamp's
approach and that of his nineteenth-century predecessor Thoreau:57
And that's what links me the most closely with Duchamp and Thoreau.
In both of them, as different as they may be, you find a complete
absence of interest in self expression. Thoreau wanted only one thing:
to see and hear the world around him. When he found himself inter-
ested in writing, he hoped to find a way of writing which would allow
others not to see and hear how he had done it, but to see what he had
seen and to hear what he had heard. He was not the one who chose his
words. They came to him from what there is to see and hear. You're
going to tell me that Thoreau had a definite style. He has his very own
way of writing. But in a rather significant way, as his Journal continues,
his words become simplified or shorter. The longest words, I would be
tempted to say, contain something of Thoreau in them. But not in the
shortest words. They are words from common language, everyday
words. So as the words become shorter, Thoreau's own experiences
become more and more transparent. They are no longer his experi-
ences. It is experience. And his work improves to the extent that he
disappears. He no longer speaks, he no longer writes; he lets things
speak and write as they are; I have tried to do nothing else in music.
Subjectivity no longer comes into it.58
Cage considered this a movement away from memory, from sym-

bolism, in a way strikingly similar to a common phrase quite familiar
to Americanists. It in fact serves as a chapter heading in F. O. Mat-
thiessen's American Renaissance, "The Word One with the Thing."
Matthiessen writes, "The epitome of Emerson's belief is that 'in good
writing, words become one with things.' " This then leads to a discus-
sion of organic unity, in which symbolism plays an essential role.
Consequently, it is the direction of language that differs and, in this
case, leads one away from Matthiessen's Emerson, "where the object is
lost in thought,"59 and toward Thoreau, who, Cage believed, was
moving away from thought and toward the experience of the object in
and of itself. And it is the example of Thoreau that showed Cage a
way of "musicating language":
CHARLES: If I may now transpose everything you just said to the area of
language, it seems to me that Thoreau is no less fascinating
when he writes, when he frees words. Isn't he concerned
with opening up words? And haven't you taken up this con-
cern in turn? Aren't your lectures, for example, musical
works in the manner of the different chapters of Walden?
CAGE: They are when sounds are words. But I must say that I have
not yet carried language to the point to which I have taken
musical sounds. I have not yet made noise with it. I hope to
make something other than language from it.
CHARLES: How do you expect to accomplish that?

CAGE: It is that aspect, the impossibility of language, that interests me
at present. I am now working on that problem in a text
taken straight from the Song Books, which deals directly with
letters, syllables, etc., mixing them in such a way that you
could call it a Thoreau Mix. 60
This piece, as mentioned in the previous endnote, was eventu-

ally called Mureau, the title being a combination of "music" (the first
two letters) and "Thoreau" (the last four letters). Cage discusses this
work in the foreword to M: "Mureau departs from conventional syn-
tax. It is a mix of letters, syllables, words, phrases, and sentences. I
wrote it by subjecting all the remarks of Henry David Thoreau about
music, silence, and sounds he heard that are indexed in the Dover
publication of the Journal to a series of I Ching chance operations.'"61
The title indicates that Cage was, as he suggests in his conversation
with Charles, looking to find a way to take the Journal of Thoreau
and somehow "musicate it." His initial task in that direction was
the removal of syntax: "As we move away from it, we demilitarize
language. "62
Removing syntax would allow words to do what Cage thought
Thoreau was trying to have them do: "Since words, when they com-
municate, have no effect, words become nonsense as they do between
lovers, in which words become what they originally were: trees and
stars and the rest of the primeval environment."63 Language would
move in the direction of the observation of things. Thus, parallel to
Cage's view that music does not communicate, Cage tried to make a
language that does not communicate: "The demilitarization of
language: a serious musical concern.'"64
However, Cage realized that Mureau had not yet made music out
of language; there was still too much language in it and not enough
silence:
sparrowsitA gROsbeak betrays itself by that peculiar

squeakariEFFECT OF SLIGHTEST tinkling measures soundness
ingplease We hear! Does it not rather hear us? sWhen he
hears the telegraph, he thinksthose bugs have issued
forthThe owl touches the stops, wakes reverberations
d qwalky In verse there is no inherent music65
In these first few lines of Mureau, the chance-operated mixture of

letters, syllables, words, and sentences goes far beyond the chance
operations used to make Cage's Diaries. But Mureau still makes sense.
Individual words tend to be read as sentences even when those sen-
tences are devised by the reader rather than by Thoreau. Syllables

tend to sound as interruptions of thought rather than as capable of
thought, or, as with individual letters, simply attach themselves to
other words, syllables, or letters. While Mureau is still interesting
poetry, it does not accomplish what Cage had in mind: "I think we
need to have more nonsense in the field of language."66 He therefore
continued to search for a verse that had what he could regard as
"inherent music." This led to the creation of what I regard as one of
Cage's finest poetic works, Empty Words.
Empty Words was written between 1973 and 1974. According to
Revill, the title was inspired by a conversation with the Oriental
scholar William McNaughton, who in 1973 "told Cage that the classi-
cal Chinese language can be classified into 'full words' and 'empty
words.' A full word has a specific, in a loose sense referential meaning;
nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, are full words, though which of
these forms the word takes cannot always be determined. Empty words
are conjunctions, particles, pronouns, which refer only to other terms:
a, at, it.)"67
In his introduction to the first part, Cage describes the direction
of his work leading to the creation of Empty Words: hearing Wendell
Berry read aloud from the Journal in 1967, the importance of Thoreau
in Cage's composition Songbooks (1970), and the use of chance opera-
tions in Mureau.68 Chance, as in all of Cage's compositions that use
it, alters the composer's role from that of making choices to one of
asking questions:
My composition arises out of asking questions. I am reminded of a story

early on about a class with Schoenberg. He had us go to the blackboard
to solve a particular problem in counterpoint (though it was a class in
harmony). He said: "When you have a solution, turn around and let
me see it." I did that. He then said: "Now another solution please." I
gave another and another until finally, having made seven or eight, I
reflected a moment and then said with some certainty: "There aren't
any more solutions." He said: "O.K. What is the principle underlying
all of the solutions?" I couldn't answer his question; but I had always
worshipped the man, and at that point I did even more. He ascended,
so to speak. I spent the rest of my life, until recently, hearing him ask
that question over and over. And then it occurred to me through the
direction that my work has taken, which is renunciation of choices and
the substitution of asking questions, that the principle underlying all of
the solutions that I had given him was the question that he had asked,
because they certainly didn't come from any other point. He would
have accepted that answer, I think. The answers have the question in
common. Therefore the question underlies the answers.69
Both Mureau and Empty Words begin with the same question:
What can be done with the English language? Use it as material. Mate-
rial of five kinds: letters, syllables, words, phrases, sentences. A text for
a song can be a vocalise: just letters. Can be just syllables, just words;
just a string of phrases; sentences. Or combinations of letters and sylla-
bles (for example), letters and words, et cetera. There are 25 possible
combinations. Relate 64 (I Ching) to 25 . . . Mureau uses all twenty-
five possibilities. 70
On the other hand-and this is of key significance--Empty Words

does not use all twenty-five: in the first part, Cage, without using
chance operations, eliminated the possibility of sentences by choice.71
The difference is striking:
notAt evening
right can see
suited to the morning hour
trucksrsq Measured tSee t A
ys sfOi w dee e str oais
stkva o dcommoncurious 20
theeberries flowers r clover72
In Mureau, chance operations produced an almost flowing sentence

structure, whereas in Empty Words, due to the elimination of sen-
tences, the text becomes much more disjunct. If phrases, they appear
as phrases, if words as words, thus illustrating in text what Cage once
said about music: "I try to approach each sound as itself.""73 Due to
Cage's purposeful subtraction of sentences, each phrase, word,
syllable, and letter begins to be read "as itself."
Another clue to Cage's intentions was his inclusion of drawings
by Thoreau, which he describes in the introduction to part one:
"Amazed (1) by their beauty, (2) by fact I had not (67-73) been
seeing 'em as beautiful, (3) by running across Thoreau's remark: 'No
page in my Journal is more suggestive than one which includes a
sketch.' Illustrations out of context. Suggestivity. Through a museum
on roller skates. Cloud of unknowing. Ideograms. Modem Art. Tho-
reau."74 In Empty Words, language begins to move in the direction of
those illustrations, those ideograms where in China, according to Ezra
Pound, they "still use pictures AS pictures, that is to say, Chinese
ideogram does not try to be the picture of a sound, or to be a written
sign recalling a sound, but it is still the picture of a thing; of a thing
in a given position or relation, or of a combination of things. It means
the thing or the action or the situation."75
However, the emphasis remains on "begins." For Cage correctly

envisioned this text as a "transition from literature to music."76 As
such, it is a transition in process, where the symbolic nature of lan-
guage is being subverted. In part one, while intention is removed
through chance operations, words still connect in specifically mean-
ingful ways: "notAt evening," for example, or "suited to the morning
hour." For language to exist as sounds exist, it must be something
other than just nonintentional: it must cease to intentionally "mean."
This is the process that Cage has set in motion.
Part two removes the possibility of phrases. The introduction to
this part continues to describe what questions were asked: "First ques-
tions; What is being done? for how many times? ... In which vol-
ume of the Journal's fourteen is the syllable to be found? In which
group of pages ? On which page of this group ? On which line of this
page?"77 The questions help inform both the immensity of the task
and why it took so long to complete. And yet, the most significant
change in this part is the elimination of phrases, which was not a
chance operation at all:
s or past another
thise and on ghth wouldhad
andibullfrogswasina-perhapss blackbus
each f nsqlike globe?
oi for osurprisingy ter spect y-s of
wildclouds deooa Di from the
ocolorsadby h allb eblei ingselfi foot78
Eventually the process is moving away from any intentional meaning,

and while one could make a comparison between Mureau and Joyce's
language experiment Finnegans Wake, clearly the intended meanings
of Joyce's experiment differ greatly even if, on the surface, there are
textual similarities. Cage is directing the reader to the same Tower of
Babel situation he had found in music more than twenty years before:
"the impossibility of language." If it can't communicate, what can
it do? In the introduction to part three, Cage continues to describe
the direction of this process: "Searching (outloud) for a way to read.
Changing frequency. Going up and then going down; going to ex-
tremes. Establish (I, II) stanza's time. That brings about a variety of
tempi (short stanzas become slow; long become fast)."79 Measurement
continues through the selection of tempi, but the reader's role begins
to change; the reader searches "outloud for a way to read."8s After
having "gone to extremes" in parts one and two, Cage instructs the
reader to "move toward a center" in parts three and four: "To bring
about quiet of IV (silence) establish no stanza time in III or IV."'1
In part three, Cage omits the possibility of words. However, the

structures overlap: "E.g., 'a' is a letter, is a syllable, is a word.",82
Thus, as the opening to part three demonstrates, Empty Words are not
yet fully empty: "The," "perch," "great," "hind," "ten," and so on.
Are these ideograms? Or are they still symbols of things rather than
the "things themselves?" Is this the nondualism Cage produced in his
Variations III? Even when removing all but syllables and letters, the
text still linguistically "means":
theAf perchgreathind and ten

have andthewitha nae
thatlas be theirofsparrermayyour
hsglanruas theeshelf
not er n housthe ing e
-shaped wk; Wid n pstw ety
bou-a the dherlyth gth db tgn-plh ng
sthrce ght rc t e Tmsttht thsno sngly o
ophys thepfbbe ndnd tsh m ie ghl
Idsbdfrrtlybflyf Ir i q oss bns83
I think Cage realized that making the "word one with the thing"
was not enough. Nor was the increased semantic openness of language
through the use of ideograms a satisfactory solution. For Cage, the
only possibility in the midst of this impossibility called language was
a new language. And this new language required the same silence
4'33" had provided in music; the absence of any (even inherently, as
in language) intentional meaning. In a 1958 interview with Mike
Wallace, Cage addressed this very issue:
CAGE: Those artists for whom I have regard have always put their
work at the service of religion or of metaphysical truth. And
art without meaning, like mine, is also at the service of
metaphysical truth. But it also puts it in terms which are
urgent and meaningful to a person of this century.
WALLACE: Meaningful? But you said it has no meaning.
CAGE: But I mean no meaning has meaning.
WALLACE: Oh?
CAGE: Yes. This idea of no idea is a very important idea.84
For Cage, "no meaning" still had meaning. As we see in his

conversation with Richard Kostelanetz, empty words are empty not of
meaning but of intentional meaning:
CAGE: I'm not being at all scholarly about my use of the term
"empty words." I'm suggesting something more in line
with what I've already told you, namely, the transition
from language to music, and I would like with my title
to suggest the emptiness of meaning that is characteristic
of musical sounds.
KOSTELANETZ: That is to say, they exist by themselves.
CAGE: Yes. That when words are seen from a musical point of
view, they are all empty.
KOSTELANETZ: They are empty semantically?
CAGE: How do you mean?
KOSTELANETZ: "Semantic" refers to meaning. They are also empty syn-
tactically.
CAGE: I would rather say they're empty of intention.85
To remove intention requires the omission of even the ideogrammic

nature of language. It requires a complete removal of aU symbolic
reference: "I'm always amazed when people say, 'Do you mean it's just
sounds?' How they can imagine that it's anything but sounds is what's
so alarming."86 Sounds thus refer to themselves rather than to a
humanly constructed relationship between sounds and what they can
mean. Languages, too, are humanly constructed symbolic relation-
ships, and Cage's intention in part four, accomplished, once again, by
choice rather than by chance, was to remove any trace of that sym-
bolic relationship: "IV: equation between letters and silence. Making
language saying nothing at all," and finally, "Languages becoming
musics":
ie thA h bath
i c r t t I m rdt et shgg
o no d an
sn i
er t s p rt oo s
spwlae sbr87
Whereas Cage's "Lecture on Nothing" anno

intent-"I have nothing to say and I am saying
a way that has long typified his successful exper
that intent: "Making language saying nothing at
has written, "In Cage's art of 'exemplary presen
inferred is that we can only know how things h
manner of operation') but never quite what happ
why. "88
Empty Words also exemplifies the essential role of the creator

even when the goal is a "silenced" creative self. Chance operations
were used by Cage as a means of opening up the creative process, of
allowing the "outside" into the work of art. As has been shown, while
chance operations let the "outside" in, they do not, in and of them-
selves, necessarily produce "silence." It requires an intentional choice,
the successive removal of sentences, phrases, syllables and words, to
produce textual silence. In other words, something (intention) and
nothing (nonintention) are not really opposed; they do "need each
other to keep on going."89 Cage's work is therefore not an abdication
but rather a redirection of the role of the artist: "I believe that by
eliminating purpose, what I call awareness increases. Therefore my
purpose is to remove purpose."90 That "purposeful purposelessness"
attempts to remove human constructions of meaning, thus allowing
awareness of the world around us the opportunity to increase. Making,
then, need not mean in itself; it may instead open a clearing where,
as Robert Duncan has written, "We do not make things meaningful,
but in our making work toward an awareness of meaning."91 The
result is the creation of a place where distinctions between text and
music disappear, and where, as Charles Olson writes in Causal Mythol-
ogy, "that which exists through itself is what is called meaning."'92
In Empty Words, music and text become one. In fact, its greatest
significance is the exemplification of the act of becoming: "how things
happen." As in Thoreau's Walden, Cage takes the reader from where
he or she is, a world in which language communicates, and very grad-
ually (the piece takes eleven hours to perform) moves to a place
where language disappears and words do indeed become "just sounds."
In fact, the lecture ends as Walden ends, at dawn: "I thought of it as
something that could be read throughout the whole night . . timing
the last part, which is nothing but silences and letters, so that it
would end at dawn along with the opening of the windows and doors
of the world outside . . . I have become through Empty Words aware
of the dawn."93 In Empty Words, Cage "opens words" as Thoreau did,
allowing them the freedom to mean apart from symbolic intent, from
their human construction. As Thoreau wrote, "There is more day to
dawn."94 In other words, there is more than our present experience of
it, and by emptying these words of all linguistic intention, one may
then be open to an experience that includes the outside: "quieting the
mind, thus making it susceptible to divine influences,"95 which is, not
surprisingly, what in Cage's view, replaced communication as the
purpose of writing music.
In both his writings and his compositions, Cage devoted himself

to an aesthetic of coexistent inclusion. By comparing his texts and
music, one discovers a shared direction away from compositional con-
trol and toward nonintention, where "something" and "nothing" are
unopposed. Cage accomplished this first in music with 4'33" (1952)
and Variations III (1962-63). He then proceeded to accomplish the
same result in his texts. By attempting to "musicate" language, Cage
eventually moved away from syntactically controlled meaning
altogether, and language became, like music, just sounds.
In the introduction to Empty Words, Cage wrote that "a text for
a song can be a vocalise: just letters."96 In Empty Words, Cage pro-
duced that text, where language, intentionally stripped of the dualities
of its symbolism, becomes unintentional, and thus silenced, song:
Everybody has a song

which is no song at all:
it is a process of singing
and when you sing
you are where you are
All I know about method is that when I am not wor

think I know something, but when I am working, i
know nothing.97
Notes
1. Richard Kostelanetz, Conversing with Cage (New York: Li

218. Although Cage elsewhere asserts that he wrote this spee
Words [Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1979
David Revill (The Roaring Silence [New York: Arcade Publish
critic Kostelanetz (John Cage [New York: Da Capo Press, 199
text was written in 1927, when Cage was fifteen.
2. John Cage, Silence (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan Unive
3. Kostelanetz, John Cage, 81. At issue here is not whether

Webem and Satie is accurate. His opinion is, in fact, debatab
tion of whom Cage considered to be his predecessors.
4. Kostelanetz, John Cage, 81.

5. Cage, Silence, 18.
6. John Cage, "Forerunners of Modem Music," in Silence, 6
7. John Cage, "Composition as Process, I: Changes," in Sile
8. Cage, "Composition as Process," 19-20. I should mention that Cage uses "struc-
ture" to describe what might be traditionally called form while using "form" to
describe what would usually (especially in a literary sense) be called content.
9. John Cage with Daniel Charles, For the Birds (London: Marion Boyars, 1981), 55.
10. Cage, "Lecture on Nothing," in Silence, 109.
11. See Cage, "Composition as Process," 18.

12. Cage, "Lecture on Nothing," 109.
14. Revill, 85.
15. Calvin Tomkins, The Bride and the Bachelors (New York: Penguin, 1968), 97.
16. John Cage, "Memoir," in Kostelanetz, John Cage, 77.
17. Kostelanetz, Conversing with Cage, 231: "[A]n important book for me was The
Perennial Philosophy by Aldous Huxley, which is an anthology of remarks of people in
different periods of history and from different cultures--that they are all saying the
same thing, namely a quiet mind is a mind that is free of its likes and dislikes. You
can become narrow-minded, literally, by only liking certain things, and disliking oth-
ers. But you can become open-minded, literally, by giving up your likes and dislikes
and becoming interested in things. I think the Buddhists would say, 'As they are in
and of themselves.' "
18. Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy (New York: Harper & Row, 1945), 20.
19. Cage, "Memoir," 77.

20. It also connected musical and spiritual purposes, which in 1948 Cage considered
to be an important compositional concern: "I felt that an artist had an ethical respon-
sibility to society to keep alive to the contemporary spiritual needs; I felt that if he
did this, admittedly vague as it is a thing to do, his work would automatically carry
with it a usefulness to others." John Cage, "A Composer's Confessions," in John Cage:
Writer, comp. Richard Kostelanetz (New York: Limelight Editions, 1993), 34.
21. Huang Po, The Zen Teaching of Huang Po, trans. John Blofeld (New York:
Grove Press, 1958), 14.
22. Kostelanetz, Conversing with Cage, 25.

24. Cage, "Lecture on Something," in Silence, 129.
26. He received it from Christian Wolff, who was studying with Cage at the time.
According to Cage: "I didn't make him pay for his lessons. Well, his father was a
publisher. To thank me, Christian brought me books published by his father. One
day, the I Ching was among them." In Cage and Charles, 43.
27. C. G. Jung, foreword to The I Ching or Book of Changes, trans. Richard Wilhelm
(New York: Princeton University Press, 1950), xxii.
28. Cage, "A Composer's Confessions," 43. As for the second piece: "to compose
and have performed a composition using as instruments nothing but twelve radios. It
will be my Imaginary Landscape No. 4."
29. John Cage, A Year from Monday (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University
Press, 1967), 31.
30. Cage and Charles, 80.

32. Cage, "Some Random Remarks" in Kostelanetz, John Cage, 195-96. And this
has become, for Cage, the purpose of 4'33" as well: "I don't sit down to do it; I turn
my attention toward it. I realize that it's going on continuously. So, more and more,
my attention, as now, is on it." Richard Fleming and William Duckworth, eds., John
Cage at Seventy-Five (London: Associated University Presses, 1989), 22.
33. John Cage, Variations III (New York: Henmar Press, 1963).

35. Kostelanetz, Conversing with Cage, 110-11.
36. Cage, Variations III, p. 4 of list, John Cage Literary Archive, Wesleyan Univer-
sity Library.
39. Cage, Silence, x. Cage's definition of what constitutes poetry is reductive at best.
It does, however, help to place several of Cage's writings (which would include those
so far discussed, "Lecture on Nothing" and "Lecture on Something") in the context
of poetry. It is not the place of this analysis to define poetry; I would, however, sub-
mit that poetry is usually written by writers who consider it to be poetry. As such, I
regard the aforementioned lectures as Cage regarded them: as poetry.
40. This study ends in 1975 with the completion of Empty Words for reasons that
will become apparent as the analysis progresses. Cage's mesostics are brilliantly con-
ceived poetry. However, my concern lies with the connection between music and text
and the mesostic form becomes important in both after 1975, when he begins his
mesostic series on Joyce's Finnegans Wake.
41. Cage, A Year from Monday, 50.
44. According to the Map and Geographic Information Center at the University of
New Mexico, the distance between Rochester and Philadelphia is 336 miles. Using
the method recommended by the American Automobile Association, I simply divided
this distance by 50 miles per hour.
45. Cage, Silence, 57-58.

46. Cage's hexagram notation uses what look like v's for the broken lines and puts a
circle through a changing straight line and around the v for a changing broken line.
47. The other hexagrams translate, going left to right, as follows: 3. 58; 4. 29
changing to 18 (part II); 5. 46 changing to 24 (incorrectly notated as 23 at the top
but corrected when placed in the Roman-numeral structure); 6. 10; 7. 28 changing to
43 (which is placed in part IV since the twenty-eight puts the total of part III over
one hundred). 8. 50; 9. 55 (part IV); 10. 40 changing to 33; 11. 17 changing to 61
(part V); 12. 52 changing to 43; 13. 51 changing to 36 (which is not used in part VI
since 51 puts the total past one hundred).
48. Sometimes the last number makes it go over: for example, sixty-three, five, and
thirty equal ninety-eight, thus requiring one more chance operation, which turns up
as twenty-one totaling one hundred nineteen.
49. Revill, 215.
50. Order of published text: I. 63, 5, 30, 21; II. 58, 29, 18; III. 46, 24, 10, 28; e.
43, 50, 55; V. 40, 33, 17, 61; VI. 52, 43, 51. Order of texts as written in notebook:
51, 50, 43, 33, 46, 21, 61, 43, 61 (this is actually 63), 52, 55, 46, 58, 18, 29, 40,
28, 43, 30, 24, 17, 10, 5.
51. Abbreviation for "could." Cage used this often.
52. Cage, A Year from Monday, 50. References are, of course, to Marshall McLu-
han, James Joyce, and Norman O. Brown.
53. Cage, Silence, x. "As I see it, poetry is not prose simply because poetry is in one
way or another formalized."

57. I am not as sure about Duchamp as Cage was. I find that while Cage, like Tho-
reau, looks outward to the world, Duchamp's work was far more concerned with the
inward direction of human intellect.
58. Cage and Charles, 233-34. This quote is essential to understanding what Cage
saw as his relationship to Thoreau. It is also important, I would suggest, as literary
scholarship, since it is one of the most clearly articulated remarks on the importance
of Thoreau's Journal ever written. It also predates Sharon Cameron's research, which
has similar things to say, by at least fifteen years. Cameron's research can be found in
her book Writing Nature: Henry Thoreau's Journal (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1989).
59. F. O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance (New York: Oxford University Press,

1941), 30, 44.
60. Cage and Charles, 113. Cage includes a footnote: "I have since made Music
of Thoreau from it; it's the work I entitled Mureau, which I myself performed in
concert."
61. John Cage, M (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1973), fore-
word, [1].
62. Cage, M, foreword, [2].

63. Cage, Empty Words, 184.

65. John Cage, Mureau, in M, 35. It is impossible to reproduce the exact lineation
of the text here, nor am I able to get all the various typographical fonts. However,
since the text is essentially one big justified block, this reproduction does faithfully
communicate my intention of showing how much language remains in Mureau.
67. Revill, 249. Cage himself mentions 1973 as the year he spoke with McNaugh-
ton in his introduction to Empty Words Part One. Cage, Empty Words, 11.

69. Kostelanetz, Conversing with Cage, 215. Cage's deduction need not be seen as a
rationalization, since such thinking was in the air among Germans of Schoenberg's
generation. For example, in his "The Origin of the Work of Art" (1935-36), Martin
Heidegger wrote, "Each answer remains in force as an answer only as long as it is
rooted in questioning." In Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert
Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 71.

71. William Brooks, in an analysis of Songbooks (1970), writes convincingly of a
corresponding inclusion of choice in Cage's music. See "Choice and Change in Cage's
Recent Music," in A John Cage Reader, ed. Jonathan Brent and Peter Gena (New
York: C. F. Peters, 1982), 82. However, whereas Brooks argues that "that which is
arrived at by choice is in no sense preferable to that arrived at by chance" (97), my
analysis will show that intention, while coexisting with nonintention, was required in
order to achieve nondualism in Empty Words.

74. Cage, Empty Words, 11. The connection to ideograms is worth noting and
points to Cage's familiarity with Pound, Fenallosa, and the use of Chinese-language
orthography.
75. Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading (New York: New Directions, 1934), 21.

80. This, in combination with the inclusion of Thoreau's drawings (which, as men-
tioned in the introduction to part two, are specifically placed in the text through
chance operations), refutes Marjorie Perloff's contention that "[t]he 'score' of Empty
Words, recently published, is, like the earlier one of Mureau, fairly uninteresting, for
everything here depends on Cage's enormous register, his astonishing timbre, his indi-
vidual timing and articulation. Such dependence on opsis . . . is, of course, a limita-
tion; we have to attend the performance in order to respond to Cage's language
construct." Marjorie Perloff, The Poetics of Indeterminacy (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern
University Press, 1981), 337-38. Cage's elaborate instructions, are, I would argue,
instructions for reading, and the text a score for performance. I find the published
versions of both Mureau and Empty Words immensely interesting. Granted, Cage's
performances of his texts were extraordinary; however, this does not imply that his
presence is a necessary part of experiencing his poetry.

84. New York Post, 10 June 1958, 47.
86. Cole Gagne and Tracy Caras, Soundpieces: Interviews with American Composers
(London: Scarecrow Press, 1982), 78-79.
87. Cage, Empty Words, 51, 65, 66.

88. Perloff, 315-16.

91. Robert Duncan, "Toward an Open Universe," in Fictive Certainties (New York:
New Directions, 1985), 82.
92. Charles Olson, Causal Mythology (San Francisco: Four Seasons Foundation,
1969), 2.
94. Henry David Thoreau, Walden and Other Writings, ed. Brooks Atkinson (New
York: Modem Library, 1937), 297.
96. Cage, Empty Words, 11. This concern can be found as early as the late 1950s:
"At Darmstadt I was talking about the reason back of pulverization and fragmenta-
tion: for instance, using syllables instead of words in a vocal text, letters instead of
syllables." From his lecture "Indeterminacy" (1958), published, in part, as "How to
Pass, Kick, Fall, and Run," in Cage, A Year from Monday, 136.

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Silencing the Sounded Self: John Cage and the Intentionality of Nonintention

Author(s): Christopher Shultis

"What we require is silence; but what silence requires is that I go on talking."

Proving a lifelong devotion to chance operations, Cage's method of

berg. In a lecture given at Black Mountain College in 1948, Cage

In the field of structure, the field of the definition of parts and t

For Cage, duration became a means of getting around the difficulty of

is conceived; it was instead an attempt to uncover how music is per-

while walking along a beach. The form was as natural as my taste

origin in Cage's aesthetic is twofold. First, Cage's attempts at art as

The divine Ground of all existence is a spiritual Absolute, ineffable in

Cage, more often than not, tried to emphasize the removal of

The axioms of causality are being shaken to their foundations: we know

Confessions," given on 28 February 1948 before the National Inter-

This "single idea" became a process of making music that Cage

that matter, to produce the "something" of intentional sounds? How

Next followed a piece without measurement entitled Variations III,

The published score includes a title page with the statement,

Two transparent sheets of plastic, one having forty-two undifferentiated

Some or all of one's obligation may be performed through ambient

Though no means are given for the measurement of time or space

Some factors though not all of a given interpenetration or succession of

Any other activities are going on at the same time.33

multiple possibilities regarding how many circles remain, if they inter-

On the other hand, one need not count past an environmental

overlap) do we know when something is finished and the next begins?

poetry is in one way or another formalized. It is not poetry by reason

Just before setting out for Saskatchewan to conduct a music workshop

The above-mentioned Diary introduction reads: "It is a mosaic of

broken, straight, straight; li, straight, broken, straight; tui, straight,

eight divisions vertically corresponding to the eight upper trigrams. A

In Diary: Audience 1966, the first hexagram (see Figure 1) corre-

,odiY3r AUDIENCE 1966

broadcast for those who prefer staying atrtom?. TLzr -hol._d-be-a

number of words required. After he had worked them into a form he

everything, and saved it in an orderly fashion. This is particularly true

(Don't think) (T)the answer's No;

Compare this to the published text:

Could we do it with a computer?

to come up with eleven more words if he accepted the change, which

Could we do it with a computer?

I. Are we an audience for c mputer art? The answer's not

No; it's Yes. What we need us a computer that isn't

that puns (this is McLuhan's idea) as well as Joyce

revealing bridges (this is Brown's idea) where we thought

there weren't any, turns us my idea) not "on" but into

artists,. - ....1 Indians have

Maya. Twentieth century art' opened our eyes. Now music's

opened our ears. Theater? JLst notice what's around. (If

what you want in India is aniaudience, Gita Sarabh

Listening to your music I find it provokes me. What should

I do to enjoy it? Answer: There're many ways to help you.

I'd give you a lift,for instance,if you were going in my

how to use your own aesthetic faculties. (You see? W

nothing to do. So what shall we do? Sit in an audience?

Write criticism? Be creative?) We used to have the

artist up on a pedestal. Now he's no more extraordinary

than we are. III. Notice audiences at high altitudes

and audiences in northern countries tend to be attentive

Thus what initially appears to be an improvised and haphazard

CHARLES: You propose to musicate language; you want language to be

An essential aspect of Cage's approach to sound is away from memory:

There is a beautiful statement, in my opinion, by Marcel Duchamp: